Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018
The Old Ways: Twin Peaks by Linda Raedisch
Beltane
IT’S BEEN HALF A turn of the year’s wheel since Halloween. Tonight is Walpurgis Night, and in some parts of Europe, little girls will be dressing up as witches again to celebrate the old belief that on April 30 witches from all over the map mounted their broomsticks and flew to the Brocken, a grim mountain in north-central Germany, for the biggest sabbat of the year. So this seems like a good time to ask: What were they wearing?
The witches of medieval folk and fairytale wore kerchiefs or nothing at all, but many of today’s Walpurgisnacht celebrants will be wearing pointy hats. In a nineteenth-century engraving of sixteenth-century Scotsman John Fian’s coven, the witches flying round the churchyard are wearing pointy hats too. Had such a coven actually existed, they would certainly not have been, for the high-crowned, broad-brimmed black felt hat did not become a cutting-edge accessory until the early 1600’.
In her portrait of 1616, Rebecca Rolfe, a.k.a. Pocahontas, signals her acceptance into English society by wearing the Geneva or Pilgrim’s Hat, as it was known. Though high in the crown, Rebecca’s hat has a flat top. In the waning days of the black felt hat’s popularity, the crown was shortened, and the brim turned up at the sides, giving us the hat we are now used to seeing on the Quaker Oats man. By the 1700s, the only people still wearing the classic pilgrims hat were the Welsh and a handful of old crones living in the backwaters of North America, the very women most likely to be suspected of witchcraft, though the drive to torture and execute them had finally waned.
Witches and Hats
To this day, Mother Goose wears a pilgrim’s hat dressed up with ribbon, buckle and white, frilled cap. While Mother Goose’s conservatism makes her merely quaint, the witch figure is an unkind exaggeration of the old Puritan woman living alone on the outskirts of town, eschewing merriment in all its forms and scowling at passersby. Just as her character was exaggerated, so was her hat: the rim grew as broad as a cake plate, while the crown rose so high that the only logical outcome was that it should come to a point.
And at this point, dear readers, some of you will have risen from your comfortable chairs and tossed this book aside in order to defend the great antiquity of the witch’s hat. A handful of you might even be asking, flabbergasted, “What about the Three Witches of Subeshi?”
For those of you still seated, the Three Witches of Subeshi is the name given in fondness to the remains of three ladies who were buried in a hilltop cemetery in the Qizil-tagh, or “Flaming Mountains,” of Western China, sometime between 500 and 300 BCE. The area now belongs to the People’s Republic of China, but most of its population are Turkic-speaking Uighurs. We don’t know what language our so-called Witches spoke because, while their bones and personal effects have been preserved by the merciless aridity of the sands, they left no written records.
The Flaming Mountains are just northeast of the Tarim Basin, one of the driest regions in the world. In our witches’ day, before the rivers changed course, it would have been a little easier to make a living here in the foothills. Our Three Witches could have kept their sheep and goats close by instead of having to drive them up into the mountains each summer. They also raised wheat and millet and exchanged some of their goods with the footloose nomads who trickled down into the valley. Some of those nomads decided to stay, taking up farming but retaining their own peculiar fashion sense as they merged with the descendants of the Ayding Lake People who flourished here in the late Bronze Age.
Unfortunately, our witches are not as well preserved as some of the older mummies of the Tarim Basin. They are not much more than well-dressed skeletons, but their initial resemblance to Halloween witches is striking. A pouch containing a humble cosmetics kit accompanied the Hightop Witch, as I like to call her. She wore short, pale leather boots, the kind of moccasins worn by the Navajo and Apache of America’s Desert Southwest. Once she had pulled on her hightops, she could have used the pointed stick of kohl to outline her eyes, reddened her cheeks with the ochre and even whitened her face either for ritual purposes or to make it look as if she had not been out minding the sheep all day in the bright sun. She had a comb, too, for combing the legions of nits out of her long hair before she bound it up inside a black yarn hairnet. Netting covered the brim of her charcoal-gray hat as well: a hat that, at almost a yard in height, had to be placed beside her in the grave. The crown, which tapered to a rounded point, was held up by sticks jammed inside it.
The Mitten Witch was buried in a fleece-lined cloak thrown over the shoulders of her brown wool blouse and a skirt woven in narrow horizontal stripes of red, blue, purplish brown and mustard gold. Her delicate leather slippers were stitched to her woven stockings, to save time in dressing, I suppose. While the crown of the Mitten Witch’s hat was only about two feet tall, it culminated in not one but two emphatically pointed peaks. Soft-brimmed, the Mitten Witch’s hat is more like a hood than a hat. And, oh yes, she wears what appears to be a falconer’s mitten on her left hand.
The Winter Witch was the proud owner of yet another double-peaked hat, this one with a sort of veil hanging down from it and covering her face. Her grave contained a generous array of personal and household objects as well as a husband. The couple were both bundled up against the cold in jackets and boots and most likely died in winter.
So what is the history of these “witches’ hats”? Back in the Bronze Age, people with distinctly Caucasian looks had wandered into the Tarim Basin, probably from the west. They wore a variety of molded felt caps that rose to soft peaks and were festooned with red and yellow cords and little bunches of feathers. They were more like the Phrygian caps known to the ancient Greeks than witches’ hats. Though the people of Subeshi were probably in part descended from these Bronze Age wanderers, they were neither Caucasian nor East Asian, but something in between, like many Central Asians today. Our Witches’ exaggerated crowns were more directly inspired by the headdresses of the Saka, a complex of tribal peoples who represented the eastern end of the cultural spectrum which ended with the Scythians in the west. The Sakas’ distant, literate cousins, the Persians, divided these roving bands into the “Haoma-worshipping Saka,” the “Saka from over the Sea” (Scythians) and the “Pointed Cap Saka.”
Our Witches were the contemporaries, or near contemporaries, of the “Ice Princess” who lived to the north and west of Subeshi, on the other side of the Altai Mountains. The Ice Princess was laid in her wooden coffin with a three-foot-tall plume of black felt held up by wooden rods and was just one of a number of “princesses,” “warrior priestesses,” and “Amazons” who wore their unwieldy headgear into the emerald pastures of the afterlife. The Ice Princess was also sent off with golden ornaments and a tunic of wild silk.
Though by no means wealthy, the Three Witches of Subeshi were certainly women of high standing, possibly priestesses and probably not “witches” at all. So, is there anything to be said for the Great Antiquity of the Witch’s Hat? The putting of tall, pointy hats on the heads of important people was an established practice among early Indo-European-speakers such as the Hittites, Persians and Scythians. Europe lies at the far western end of that cultural horizon. Could some memory of the pointy hat have persisted in the English-speaking world into the nineteenth century? Maybe.
Resources
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Mummies of Ürümchi. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999.
Mair, Victor H. “Mummies of the Tarim Basin,” Archaeology, March/April 1995.
Mallory, J. P., and Victor H. Mair. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.